Mediterranean Report: Maintaining Cotton Purity Is a Top Priority for Egypt
January 5, 2012 By Dr. Mahmoud El Bagoury
Chairman, CATGO
To re-establish Egyptian cotton’s reputation, we must search for a solution beginning with production, marketing, trading, exporting and manufacturing, and then analyze the problems carefully before finding scientific and practical solutions to them.
This can be achieved through an integrated program that ensures the elimination of all obstacles confronting Egyptian cotton, in addition to effective implementation by setting plans and research programs to achieve sustainable benefits to all sectors. The government and Ministry of Agriculture have a strong tendency to increase cotton’s cultivated area, as it reached 220,000 hectares in 2011/2012. Continuous increases are expected in coming seasons to meet Egyptian cotton’s domestic and export market demands.
We should seek to raise cotton productivity through the development of new strains and varieties with high average yields, as well as use the best management and agricultural extension practices to obtain the highest productivity with lower costs. By implementing integrated pest management programs and making the appropriate tools available at reasonable prices – especially fertilizers and pesticides – we can determine the ideal time for application, in order to achieve the best and safest usage guidelines
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The aforementioned factors aim to decrease production costs and obtain high yields, which will lead to the increased competitiveness of cotton versus alternative crops. Increased mechanization is another way to achieve lower costs.
Maintaining Egyptian Cotton
The cotton industry in Egypt must maintain the purity of its cotton seeds through specific authorities, trading companies and associations, which in turn make contracts with cotton seed producers. We also must find new mechanisms to control the seeds from the planting stage to protect them from being mixed. Areas that are exposed to mixing during planting should be excluded. Other initiatives include:
Monitoring the ginning process, which is done under the supervision of the Ministry of Agriculture.
Identifying the appropriate marketing means to maintain the purity of the Egyptian cotton varieties and strains.
Producing new strains from Egyptian varieties that are characterized by a high average yield, a high ginning output, cotton fibers (lint) with high technical qualities that lead to a high yield. This will not only improve the producer’s income, it will also help cotton’s competitiveness with alternative crops.
Studying price policy through various marketing sectors to achieve the best price. This will stabilize the cotton markets and not only ensure the best price for the producer, it will also give provide enough fiber to meet the needs of exporters. Local spinning mills require sufficient quantities of cotton at moderate prices in order to help revive the Egyptian spinning and weaving industry and add value to the production of textiles in the global markets.
The protection of Egyptian cotton quality throughout the marketing process. This can be accomplished through the cooperation of marketing sectors in regulating seed cotton trading and the prohibition of purchasing seed cotton with fixed prices before classing and grading by CATGO’s classers. The process of classing, variety determination, grade estimation, and drawing and evaluating ginning samples is necessary to achieve an appropriate price for the cotton’s producers and ensure the merchant can obtain cotton with known variety, grade and quality. Additionally, we can ensure the positive reputation of Egyptian cotton by protecting it from deception, contamination, mixing, and higher levels of trash. This could be achieved by selecting locations, collecting centers (picking centers) and marketing rings that are far away from the various sources of contamination.
As for the ginning industry and its development, the goal should be to produce homogenous lint cotton with high quality that is free from seed fragments, neps and other problems that may result from imperfect ginning processes.
Egyptian cotton plays an important role by continuing the flow of new investment money to the mills, as well as the establishment of new industrial areas.
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